LiveSide - News blog : Windows Live Core

James Hamilton leaves Microsoft for Amazon

Kip Kniskern — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 20:40:56 GMT

Microsoft Data Centers Futures Architect James Hamilton is leaving Microsoft to become a Vice President at Amazon Web Services, according to a report by TechFlash, citing posts on Hamilton’s website and an email from an Amazon spokesman confirming the move.

Hamilton, one of the original members of Windows Live Core, the Ray Ozzie incubation team worked on Microsoft’s Live Services, was one of the originators of using containers as units of data center hardware storage. We’ve enjoyed reading his blog and hope he keeps it up as he moves to Amazon. Good luck, James!

Ready for Live Mesh? LiveSide to bring you “Live Mesh news”

Kip Kniskern — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:56:00 GMT

Next week, at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, Microsoft is expected to unveil Live Mesh, a new product that will bring the first of Ray Ozzie’s services vision to light. Live Mesh combines a program installation on computers with a “web desktop”, or cloud based storage, and will allow computers on the “mesh” to synchronize folders among computers and to the cloud, share folders with others, and access computers on the mesh remotely from another computer or by accessing the “web desktop” via the internet.

We’ve been telling you about Live Mesh for quite some time, and as early as last December we told you to “pay attention to feedsync”. Then at Mix08 (and yeah I know the Mix badge is still on LiveSide, but have you checked out all the videos?), we deciphered Ray Ozzie’s cryptic messages for you, although the naming looks like it’s changed a bit, and Live Mesh now refers to the product that will control the “mesh” of devices to sync and share, something that was referred to as Horizon. Or something like that. Anyway, it’s Live Mesh for now.

While we’ve got a general idea of how this is all going to work – file synch via RSS shared extensions (which Microsoft is calling Feedsync, and which it placed under the open specifications promise), plus a lot more, we’re sure, we can’t wait to get a real look at what Live Mesh can do.

So we’re going to be bringing you the announcements as they hit the wire next week, and head on down to San Francisco on Thursday to get our hands on, see some demos, and talk to some of our soon to be Live Mesh friends.

We’ll have a lot more next week, but you can study up in the meantime:

LiveSide stories tagged

Red Dog: Ray Ozzie's answer to the Google App Engine?

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 11:09:00 GMT

(Note: while we've been serving up a number of potential new Windows Live logos recently, this isn't one of them. I just happen to like Clifford the Big Red Dog)

Much has been made recently about last night's announcement of the Google App Engine, along with some discussion of the seeming lack of a counterpart coming from Microsoft. For those of you not accustomed to frequent visits to Techmeme, Google App Engine is, according to the Google App Engine Blog:

...a developer tool that enables you to run your web applications on Google's infrastructure. The goal is to make it easy to get started with a new web app, and then make it easy to scale when that app reaches the point where it's receiving significant traffic and has millions of users.
Google App Engine gives you access to the same building blocks that Google uses for its own applications, making it easier to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data. (...) Google App Engine packages these building blocks and takes care of the infrastructure stack, leaving you more time to focus on writing code and improving your application.

Amazon has a similar service, although perhaps not as neatly bundled, called EC2. So with all the talk from Microsoft about cloud services, what are they up to? Well we did a little digging, and although nothing specific has been announced yet (and we don't have a timetable), new set of services, part of Ray Ozzie's four layer platform of services, is indeed being readied. One of these, the Microsoft Utility Computing Platform, code named Red Dog, sounds very much like a platform for building a Google App Engine type service (except maybe quite a bit better). In a job posting for an SDET, the Cloud Infrastructure Services (CIS) team has provided us with some of the juicy tidbits we found. The posting itself is a little dense, written to appeal to seasoned developers looking for new challenges. But to paraphrase a bit, here's what the (CIS) team is building with Red Dog:

an "efficient, virtualized" environment
a "fully automated service management system" (like the Google App Engine, you won't have to worry about managing the system)
on "highly scalable" storage services (you only use the storage you need)
the service will "scale to millions of machines" across Microsoft's data centers (geo-located, easy to maintain data centers, remember?)
"will lead the marketplace as the best platform for rapid development, deployment, and maintenance of internet services and applications"
SDK and tools will be included for external and internal customers
V1 for external customers in the coming year

We don't know a whole lot more about Red Dog at this point, or even, truthfully, how closely a go to market product will resemble the Google App Engine. But the job posting, along with some other indications, seem to point to a Microsoft response sometime "in the coming year". Clifford will be so happy.

Horizon & Windows Live Core - Microsoft registers domains for dogfood

Chris — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 01:04:00 GMT

Its been almost a year since we first mentioned Windows Live Core, the project lead by Ray Ozzie to establish Microsoft's software as a service platform and not much has been said since then. Microsoft hasn't acknowledged its existance, despite the various exec bios and other documents mentioning the name. This isn't suprising however when you consider that when it was started, the team was locked away in Red West C out of sight from both those inside and outside of Microsoft. Since then we've made only a handful of posts, most of them relating to the massive spending on datacenters that has been occuring over the past year and Ozzie has remained more out of sight than is usual even for him.

In our 2007 recap post we mentioned Horizon, one part of Windows Live Core relating to file sychronisation and remote access that is at the internal dogfood stage. Since the new year Microsoft has since registered mshorizon.com (and the other main TLDs) to use for its testing. Of course if you're not an employee you won't see much beyond the Live ID signin page, but hidden inside is one part of Horizon, the web desktop. How long this stage of development and testing will last is unknown, but it seems unlikely that a half-baked solution will be put out for public consumption. Ozzie isn't scheduled to speak at Mix08 either.

While we admit to being deliberately vague about Horizon (see point #7 of our manifesto), it helps that Ray Ozzie has already alluded to what Microsoft wants to deliver. Time to refer back to his Internet Services Disruption memo. We already talked briefly about opportunity #1, the seamless OS, when we talked about the recent Windows 7 news. Now its time to also include #3. Here's what Ozzie said as a reminder:

"SEAMLESS OS – The operating system as it would be designed for today’s multi-PC, multi-device, work anywhere, web-based world. Enabling you to login using any of your service-based or enterprise identities. Deploying software automatically and as appropriate to all your devices, and roaming application data and settings. Permitting seamless access to storage across all your PCs, devices, servers and the web.

...

SEAMLESS PRODUCTIVITY – Enabling you to create, find and organize documents and data among all the desktops, devices, servers and services to which you have access, and with all the others with whom you need to work, through ‘shared space’ products that are internet service-based, enterprise server-based and directly peer-to-peer. Working within and across homes, small businesses, virtual workgroups and enterprises."

One way we like to monitor the current trends inside Microsft is by the search keywords softies used to get to our site. Our top 10 searches for January, restricted to Microsoft users only, contains both 'horizon windows live core' and also '"windows live core" horizon'. Time to start paying attention.

Windows Live at MGX

Chris — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 02:50:00 GMT

With all the fuss about a "leaked" powerpoint from the MGX conference (that gives a tentative date for Windows 7 of 2010,) you'd be forgiven for missing the few points made relating to Windows Live. Here's a couple of blog posts that caught our eye.

Ray Ozzie gave a keynote and showed again that he "‘gets’ what it means to be a software+services company." Windows Live Core, roaming profiles, datacenters, the list of what he may or may not have talked about goes on. (link)
Datacenters! Datacenters! Datacenters! Did we mention the importance of datacenters? (link)
The Windows Live sessions were full. Someone must have done a really good job. (link)
More love for Windows Live (link)

Sounds like those softies were getting excited about something; to bad nobody leaked a Search 2.0 powerpoint. Here's hoping Ozzie speaks again at the Financial Analysts Meeting which takes place later this week.

Microsoft's Fourth Quarter Earnings Report is out: Big spending for Online Services

Harrison Hoffman — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 05:20:00 GMT

The big news today is that Microsoft released their Fourth Quarter Earnings Report. Well, that report brought some interesting news from the Online Services Group. According to the report, the Online Services Group, which includes Windows Live, lost 732 million dollars this year, way up from the 74 million that they lost the previous year. Now, what could they have spent 658 million extra dollars on this year. Luckily for us, they let us in on that too. The report sites, "increased data center costs in our Online Services Business," as the reason for the extra losses.

Well, we do know that Microsoft has built an impressive data center in Quincy, Washington. Let's see, what could Microsoft be doing with that data center? What could justify all of this money being spent on data centers for the Online Services Group? For me, all signs point to Windows Live Core. As you may recall from when we originally reported on Windows Live Core, Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect and the person in charge of Windows Live Core, was quoted in Fortune saying that "To deliver a Web-based product line, Microsoft must build a global network of server farms that will cost 'staggering' amounts of money." Although I would consider 658 million extra dollars a "staggering" amount, even for Microsoft, I have a feeling that they aren't done yet.

Another source of extra spending in the OSG was an increased headcount. They are hiring a lot of people and paying them good money. This is pure speculation, but maybe the increased salaries are coming from Ozzie's all-star team working on WL Core.

This is hard evidence, Windows Live isn't going anywhere, any time soon, especially with a massive investment like this. I'm personally excited to see what they do with it.

Official Press Release

Windows Live Core - the Software as a Service platform

Chris — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 01:09:00 GMT

While Ray Ozzie has been keeping details of his Software as a Service platform quiet, some small bits of information are emerging from other members on his team. Two of his direct reports, David Treadwell and Amitabh Srivastava are both listed as working on developing the next generation Live services platform known as Windows Live Core:

"This start-up effort will define the vision and create the implementation for cloud-based platform services that will allow the creation of compelling applications that make deep use of network-based information."

Other members of the Windows Live Core team that we've tracked down include David Cutler, who led the development of Windows, Abolade Gbadegesin, former architect of networking in Windows Vista and Elissa Murphy, Principal PM for Windows Live Core. This team has "joined Ray Ozzie to focus on next generation cloud services; to build an highly efficient computing fabric for Microsoft data centers and a services platform for agile development of high-quality cloud services." In a question and answer with financial analysts in February, Ozzie talked about how Google helped Microsoft change its thinking about services as a platform:

"In the Google case, what's fascinating to me is that although you can characterize Google as a search compete, there are two very significant things that happened at Microsoft [as a result]. One was the recognition of advertising as an economic engine," Ozzie said. "And the other was services-based infrastructure. Once the realization was made by different groups that every product would have a services component, you go back to the company's platform roots and figure out what kind of platform treats the services layer as a system."

As Srivastava's Microsoft Research page mentions, part of the work on the Windows Live Core Operating System is heavily focused on Microsoft data centers. James Hamilton, an architect on the Windows Live Core team, gave two presentations recently discussing module datacentres and how they can be used to provide economies of scale for Software as a Service. The idea of using commercial shipping containers to build high-scale datacenters seems rather unusual, however those working on the Ozzie team are the ideal candidates to innovatively solve these kinds of complex problems. The need for datacenters was highlighted by Ozzie in an interview early last year with Fortune, where he said that Microsoft must build a global network of server farms that will cost "staggering" amounts of money. For those who are saying that "Live is dead" this should serve as a reminder that Microsoft are investing heavily in online services and are serious about their future in this sector.

While the premise behind Windows Live Core is becoming clearer, there is certainly a lot more to be learnt. Whether Ray Ozzie provides more details at Mix07 is anybody's guess. We're unable to attend but will be following the events closely, and we'll be looking to our readers to send us the talk from the floor - drop us a comment below if you're planning on going and what you are hoping to see or hear.